Copy classes rather than extending them, a waste of time?

[ianc1215]

I am curious... With how fast minecraft development moves it feels like stability is never guaranteed with mods between versions. With the idea I am working on now I was considering making my classes that extend Block directly rather than using the chain of classes that extend Block for me. For example I am referring to BlockCrops. Which itself extends BlockBush which extends Block. My reasoning is if I make my Crop class I would have less trouble porting my code over when a new version comes out.

 

Does this make any difference? Or am I just wasting my time?

 

I was thinking if I made all of my Blocks and Items extend their what I call parent class (is that what you would call this?) that I could keep thing more tightly group together and make it easier to debug and update things.

 

So... Who here thinks I am crazy?

[ianc1215]

Ah I see, you make some good point I did not consider. Thanks for the insight. I will just go the normal route.

[jabelar]

I made a tutorial on this question: http://jabelarminecraft.blogspot.com/p/minecraft-forge-172-know-when-to-copy.html

 

One of the most important points is that extending a class makes your class get treated same as parent class.  Sometimes you don't want this: for example, if you wanted to make an elephant by extending a pig, then any code that checks for instanceof EntityPig will test true for your elephant.  This could have unwanted effect.  It would be better to copy the pig and modify to make an elephant.  On the other hand sometimes you do want the class to get all the benefit of the parent, because similarly there may be instanceof checks you need.  For example if you were making a magical pig then you probably would want to extend pig because your class is also a pig.

 

However, I didn't really consider how easy it was to maintain the code either way.  I think it is probably easier to maintain extending classes because usually you only change a few things in your extended class and so all the code that you didn't changed will automatically get updated.  For example, if you copied the pig to make an elephant and then in an update Minecraft made pigs do something cool, you wouldn't automatically get that for your elephant unless you copied the new stuff in.

 

Anyway, you should choose based on whether you want instanceof to include your class with the parent class or not.